Drosophila

John Skillcorn

Author: Bryan Shorrocks
Publisher: Ginn and Company Limited, London
ISBN: 0-08-025941-3
Price: n/a

Although this book is aimed at the student working in the field of genetics, it is immensely useful to anyone wanting to either collect Drosophila species from the wild or is needing to culture them artificially.  Apart from frogs, the one animal I receive most enquiries about is the fruit fly Drosophila.  I invariably direct the enquirer to this book which is, sadly, now out of print.

However, I can still make use of it by offering to send scans of relevant sections, so hopefully this will help people provide food of a wide enough variety for their frogs.

The book itself is the best general book on the topic of Drosophila I have seen on the market.  In it, Prof. Shorrocks deals with the culture of Drosophila species, collecting them from the wild as well as any funny little foibles that any of the commonly encountered species is likely to show.  In particular I am thinking of those species which use fungi as their food source.

The illustrations from the book are first rate, and I have used them all on this Website in the section on Drosophila Species.  For those interested, there is a detailed key for the identification of all those species to be commonly met with here in Britain.

I find that the book is immensely readable, even if you are not interested in the genetics of the animal.  You will discover a lot of information which may even help you in maintaining healthy colonies of frogs.

As has been said above, as far as I know to date (16th April 2003) the book is out of print.  However, there are likely to be thousands of old biology students up and down the country who still have a copy of this book collecting dust on their bookshelves.  The problem is, finding them!  It may well be worth enquiring in second-hand book shops in university towns nearest to you.  You just never know.